Satisfaction with day-to-day working relationships appears to have improved from the already healthy state we observed last year. 24% of respondents consider them good and 56% very good. Only 5% noted poor relationships. This result is particularly significant since 23% of managers indicated that there was no effective, formal hand-over - a rise of 4% on last year. It also remains unusual for members of procurement teams to stay on beyond the bid stage. In only 24% of cases did a key member do so, and among those, under half (45%) stayed between 7 and 12 months albeit 36% stayed more than 18 months.
Our results show that when contract managers had remained in the team longer than a year, the contract they worked on scored consistently highly in terms of its operational relationships. There may not be an overall causal link here, although there may well be when it comes to the views of individual contract managers. Of managers who felt their relationship was poor, 60% had been in the job less than a year, while of the people who had been in the job between two and three years 68% said it was very good.